Saturday, 15 September 2012

I've been fascinated by the movie business. Who invests such large amounts of cash up front to make a movie? How much of a gamble is it?

I've been looking at a movie budgets table published by The Numbers. It lists over 3600 (mainly US and British) movies and estimations of their budgets and grosses. It includes some unreleased and recently-released films for which the grosses are unavailable or unreliable. For the purposes of this discussion, I've excluded films before 1946 and after 2011, and those that have no income information whatsoever. That left me with 3512 movies.

I bucketed the films by logarithmic budget:

Budget

Movies

Losing Movies

Total Budget

Total Profit

ROI

Up to $9,999

7

2 (29%)

$40,100

$3,063,092

7739%

$10,000 to $99,999

33

9 (27%)

$1,102,000

$302,684,325

27567%

$100,000 to $999,999

155

57 (37%)

$66,670,000

$1,242,723,838

1964%

$1,000,000 to $9,999,999

858

309 (36%)

$3,876,788,054

$14,419,232,185

472%

$10,000,000 to $99,999,999

2256

781 (35%)

$78,584,771,638

$123,049,314,610

257%

$100,000,000 and over

203

26 (13%)

$28,762,300,000

$57,812,766,174

301%

Totals

3512

1184 (34%)

$111,292,671,792

$196,829,784,224

277%

Even from such a simple table, there are a number of interesting observations:

Very few low-budget films make it to the cinema. Those that do generally make huge profits (speaking relatively).

"D" is Evan Almighty (2007), the most expensive film ($175M) on the list that failed to make a profit, but only just.

"E" is Nomad (2005), a film in which the Kazakh government invested $40M. It only made $79,123 at the US box office. [Actually, these figures are slightly out-of-date: the film made $3M in international releases]

Rocky (1976) which made $225M off of its $1M costs. This the best ROI for a movie costing at least $1M.

The naive conclusion seems to be either (i) make lots of movies for about $100,000 in the hopes that one of them is a huge success; or (ii) persuade people to give you more than $100,000,000 thereby guaranteeing a sure-fire success.

Friday, 7 September 2012

For several years on-and-off, I've been working on a demo to showcase compression techniques and to try to sate my curiosity in cartography and country-based statistics. I've just uploaded the latest incarnation: Version 3.0.

This is a bog-standard 32-bit Windows application with all the data embedded within it. Compiling the supplied source code with Visual C 2008 produces an executable of just 118KB; compressing this with UPX brings it down to 84KB, mainly through instruction-stream compression.

The pertinent features are:

Coastline and border data for 214 countries (including South Sudan and Montenegro);

Over one hundred statistics and codes for each country;

Vector-drawn flags for each country;

128 map projections;

Choropleth statistically mapping;

The ability to save the data table as a CSV file (significantly larger than the executable!); and